


Ecclesiastes

by ladysisyphus



Category: Trigun
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-10
Updated: 2007-10-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 01:33:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21709186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus
Summary: He looked different like this, and Wolfwood guessed that was the point. Less like the man on the wanted poster. More like everybody else. More like his brother.(Spoilers to Trigun Maximum vol. 1.)
Relationships: Midvalley the Hornfreak/Nicholas D. Wolfwood, Vash the Stampede/Nicholas D. Wolfwood
Kudos: 11





	Ecclesiastes

He looked different like this, and Wolfwood guessed that was the point. Less like the man on the wanted poster. More like everybody else. More like his brother.  
  
"He won't give up, will he?" Vash asked, putting his feet up against the windowsill and teetering back in the thin wooden chair, whose legs protested the weight and stress. The sun had almost disappeared past the line of the horizon, and its last red lines lit his face. "That's the hell of it."  
  
Wolfwood had already begun to blend into the darkened corners of the room, his black suit and dusky skin bleeding into the shadows, everything blurred by the grey cigarette haze. That was the thing about the desert -- it seemed so hot, everybody said it was so hot, but that was only the sun; even in the day, the dry air dropped twenty degrees just by stepping into the shade. When the night came on, the sky couldn't hold in the heat.  
  
His stupid coat gone, he seemed almost small -- an impossible feat, really, for someone of that height and girth, but he folded up on himself so neatly, knees pressed to his chest, long arms locked behind his thighs, that to Wolfwood he looked barely larger than a child. His metal arm gleamed in the dying light, its cords and cables stretching out from rolled-up shirtsleeves, lean and inhuman, like him. Wolfwood supposed he wasn't supposed to know, but it was just one more bad secret that, like all the others, had found a way of getting out.  
  
The last line of light fell across his face, and he stared straight ahead until it had gone, unblinking. Wolfwood wondered what the sunset looked like to those eyes. Wolfwood wondered a lot of things. Like what would happen if a bullet just happened to find its way through his head here, in this paranoid little town with the well-meaning girls and their well-meaning grannies trying to make a life out of dry earth and shotgun shells. One pull of a trigger, and half of it'd be over. Hell, that first shot might even make the second one _easy_.  
  
He looked so much like his brother, for all Wolfwood supposed he couldn't let on he knew _that_ either. _Twins_ , Midvalley had told him one afternoon, grabbing the cigarette from Wolfwood's mouth and sticking it in the corner of his own, stretched out on the bed as far apart as the mattress would let them go in the heat of the day when it was too hot to touch anyone else except to fuck, _or so Legato says when he remembers to do something other than piss himself._ It was the crowning weird idea on a long chain of weird ideas: that this type of thing existed, that there were two of them, that they were brothers, that the word meant anything when talking about things like them.

Wolfwood's cigarette burned to the filter, and he tossed it to the floor, crushing it with the heel of his shoe. The black mark it left would probably never come out. As if on cue, Vash stood, setting the chair against the wall and raking his fingers through his long hair. "I suppose it's time to ask Lina for a haircut," he said softly.  
  
"Nobody'd know you without it," answered Wolfwood, without adding, _except, apparently, me._  
  
Vash stretched his arms high above his head, one flesh and one metal, tilting his back into a gentle arc. Then, with a sigh, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his round-framed civilian glasses, lenses flat and useless. He held them out in front of them, looking _at_ , not _through_ , them. "...It was nice, you know. While it lasted."  
  
"What, being normal?" Wolfwood shook his head, taking first one step closer to Vash, then another. "I hear it's overrated."  
  
"Maybe." Vash finally turned to meet Wolfwood's gaze, giving him a sheepish little grin. The backs of his eyes reflected flat in the twilight, like a cat's, and then were dark again. "But it was quiet."  
  
"Quiet's overrated too." Wolfwood shrugged. "The Bible says, there's a time for everything; a time to be born and a time to die; a time to build up and a time to break down; a time to be quiet and a time to bust shit up."  
  
Vash's lips quirked. "What book's _that_ from?"  
  
"The Bible, like I said."  
  
"Right, sorry." As quickly as it had appeared, though, the smile melted away without a trace, heat rising with nothing to hold it back, leaving his face a desert in its wake.  
  
Wolfwood was filled with a sudden urge to punch him right where that smile used to be; to grab him by the collar and shake his teeth loose; to kiss him until their mouths bled together; to drop to his knees and suck him until his tongue tasted salt and sand; to pin him to the wall and fuck him until neither of them could stand up anymore; to throw him to the ground and tear at his clothes, then at his scars, then at whatever lay beneath, until he could get to the root of the madness, the point of divergence, the one-thousandth of one-millionth of a percent difference that divided the sheep from the goats, the saints from the sinners, the men from the monsters.  
  
Instead, he turned and headed for the door. "Get that haircut early tomorrow," he said, his voice stern, "or I'm goddamn leaving without you." Impossibly empty threat laid on the air, he walked out of the room without once looking back. He knew what happened if you ever looked back.


End file.
